Rob,
I did a lot of research on it yesterday, and it seems that CMSIS is a heck of a lot more than that. CMSIS is actually a fully functional layer that sits on top of the registers etc. The idea with CMSIS is that there is a "simple" and standard interface that can be used to program any ARM Cortex M0-M4 mcu from any manufacture!
There is a whole lot of stuff in there! All kinds of cool math functions, DSP stuff, really cool ADC functions, etc. But I'm still pretty lost on how to work with it.
Also, the CMSIS functions appear to be available natively in the Arduino 1.5.6 IDE via gcc! For example, when you dig down into the libraries for the Due, the basic Arduino functions like analogRead() for example are appear to be implemented in CMSIS.
While I am able to hack together various bits and pieces by rummaging through the Arduino libraries and seeing how things are implemented, I'm still not able to figure out how to get access to functions that aren't actively used in the libraries... and there appear to be a lot of them, and they appear to be super cool.
I haven't even been able to find a reference that lists their names yet! Though there are plenty of documents outlining their structure, architecture, and coding style?
I'm still just groping around in the dark.
B